Towards Rethinking Politics Policy And Polity In The Anthropocene
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Towards Rethinking Politics, Policy and Polity in the Anthropocene
Author: Hans Günter Brauch
language: en
Publisher: Springer Nature
Release Date: 2025-02-24
Humankind faces two anthropogenic threats to its survival that are closely linked. The first is the end of the Holocene and the start of the Anthropocene, which was marked by the test of a nuclear bomb on 16 July 1945. In the prevailing peace and security narrative, nuclear weapons and the ‘other’ (country, bloc or alliance) pose a perceived threat to humankind’s survival. In the Anthropocene narrative, ‘we are the threat’ through our way of life and the burning of fossil fuels. The start of the Anthropocene coincides with a change in the international order with the setting up of the UN and the Bretton Woods Institutions. Three stages of this order are distinguished: the Cold War (bipolarity), the post-Cold War era (unipolarity), and the end of the rule-based global liberal order (multipolarity) on 24 February 2022. In this book ten multidisciplinary perspectives discuss complexity, Anthropocene geopolitics, peace and security discourses and the debate on the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries, complex crises and integrative geography in the Anthropocene, governance and politics, and the Patriacene and gender. Both existential threats for humankind are illustrated by cover photos of the first nuclear weapons test on 16 July 1945 and by Category 5 Hurricane Otis, an extreme weather event impacting on Acapulco in Mexico on 25 October 2023. The Anthropocene as a new epoch of Earth history coincides in 1945 with a change in the international order. In the security and peace narrative, the ‘other’ and nuclear weapons pose an existential threat; in the Anthropocene narrative. This dual existential change requires a rethinking of politics, policy and polity. In the social sciences, the Anthropocene is being discussed from multidisciplinary perspectives (geography, political science, and peace, security, and gender studies). This is an open access publication.
Politics and the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene has become central to understanding the intimate connections between human life and the natural environment, but it has fractured our sense of time and possibility. What implications does that fracturing have for how we should think about politics in these new times? In this cutting-edge intervention, Duncan Kelly considers how this new geological era could shape our future by engaging with the recent past of our political thinking. If politics remains a short-term affair governed by electoral cycles, could an Anthropocenic sense of time, value and prosperity be built into it, altering long-established views about abundance, energy and growth? Is the Anthropocene so disruptive that it is no more than a harbinger of ecological doom, or can modern politics adapt by rethinking older debates about states, territories, and populations? Kelly rejects both pessimistic fatalism about humanity’s demise, and an optimistic fatalism that makes the Anthropocene into a problem too big for politics, best left to the market or technology to solve. His skilful defence of the potential for democratic politics to negotiate this challenge is an indispensable guide to the ideas that matter most to understanding this epochal transformation.
Simon Dalby: A Pioneer in International Relations
This book profiles Simon Dalby’s academic contributions in the fields of critical geopolitics, environmental security and the intersection of international relations and the Anthropocene. It includes reprints of key essays that highlight innovations in critical thought at the intersections between geopolitics, environment and security. Starting with an analysis of American reconstructions of the Soviet threat in the 1970s, an early contribution to the emerging field of critical geopolitics, subsequent papers focus on the emergent formulations of environmental security in the aftermath of the Cold War and the environmental costs of globalization. Focusing on the implicit geographical framing in discourses of globalization offered a critique that extended the ambit of critical geopolitics to grapple with the issues of environmental security and the rising concern with climate change as well as the political identities invoked in that debate. In the aftermath of 9/11, similar arguments about contextualization applied to the American global war on terror and the revival of discussions of empire and its geographies, both in arguments for invading Iraq, as well as the wider discussions in policy discourse and popular culture. Simultaneously, the emergence of earth system science and the concept of the Anthropocene offered another way to highlight the dangers of fossil fueled economic activities. The necessity of fundamentally rethinking the premises of security policy in light of this recontextualization is emphasized in more recent contributions on climate security and the current ecological crisis. Critical geopolitics Environmental security Global war on terror Firepower in the Anthropocene